This is an update from those who are, in effect, under siege at the university: Between 21 and 34 students and two professors were picked up yesterday around 5 pm, brutally beaten in a police van, and detained in unknown locations all night. We have some information now that they were detained in Miyapur and…
BY RISA LIEBERWITZ Yesterday, AAUP posted for public comment a draft report, “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.” This extensive report, an evaluation of the history and current uses of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, is a joint effort authored by a subcommittee (which I chaired) comprised of members of…
Marquette University yesterday announced the punishment of John McAdams for his crime of publicly criticizing a graduate student teacher’s pedagogy on his blog: He will be suspended (and banned) from campus until January 2017 (without pay but with benefits), and apparently will be forced to apologize for his actions as a condition of reinstatement. According to…
Most of the text below was read at the University of California Regents Public Comment session March 23 in San Francisco. Following public comment, the regents amended the original text of the “Principles Against Intolerance” to which this statement refers. The revised policy was adopted without further debate today by the full board. The new…
Here is another excellent perspective on the University of California Board of Regents consideration of a proposed “intolerance policy” by UCLA History Professor Michael Meranze, posted originally on his Remaking the University blog. This Wednesday the Regents Committee on Educational Policy will be taking up the Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles…
On Wednesday of this week, the University of California Board of Regents will meet to consider a number of controversial proposals, among them a revised version of a proposed “intolerance policy.” The policy, which was prompted initially by allegations of harassment of Jewish students, had met with wide criticism when first proposed last Fall from advocates…
BY HANK REICHMAN It has become a commonplace assumption that conservatives are a vanishing breed in academia and that American colleges and universities are inherently hostile to right-leaning political views. This assumption fuels not only the often tiresome complaints from the right about “political correctness” on campus, but also the increasingly destructive assault by Republican-controlled…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday word came that Simon Newman, the notorious president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, had resigned. Newman, readers will recall, was the fool who spoke of drowning at-risk freshmen like “bunnies” and who summarily dismissed (and subsequently reinstated) two long-time faculty members for “disloyalty.” (For background go here, here, and…
BY HANK REICHMAN This Friday, March 4, Alice Dreger is scheduled to speak on academic freedom at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE). Dreger is the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, an engaging, personal,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I posted a piece about the decision by Williams College President Adam Falk to cancel a speech by John Derbyshire, a controversial conservative. Then yesterday William Covino, President of California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), announced that he would cancel a talk by Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of the notorious Breitbart…